We are thrilled to announce the 20 grand prize winners of Google Code-in 2012, a contest designed to introduce teenagers to the world of open source software development. Congratulations to all 334 students from 36 countries who participated in the contest, completing 1,925 tasks.

Each of the 10 open source mentoring organizations that worked with the students during the contest chose 2 students to be their organization’s grand prize winners based on the students’ comprehensive body of work during the seven week contest period.

Students are listed alphabetically (by first name) with their country and the organization that they worked with during Google Code-in 2012.

These 20 pre-university students completed an impressive 576 tasks ranging from annotating face recognition for disaster response efforts to creating videos and screencasts to teach others about the organization’s software to writing scripts to develop MySQL tables. In late April, the grand prize winners will be flown to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, USA along with a parent or legal guardian for a four night visit. During the trip the students will have the opportunity to participate in an awards ceremony, meet with Google engineers, have a full day of fun exploring San Francisco, and make new friends also interested in open source development.

A couple of quotes from the mentors that worked with this year’s Google Code-in students:

'They're surprisingly motivated, excited to contribute, genuinely interested, and productive to boot. Initial estimates indicate we may get years worth of work done and one student has already earned commit status, two others are getting close.' -- Sean Morrison, BRL-CAD Organization Administrator and Mentor, two weeks after the start of the contest

‘One of my favorite quotes, one you probably have seen before, from a student: "this is my first patch to an open source project"’ -- Walter Bender, Sugar Labs Organization Administrator and Mentor

And that is what this contest is all about, introducing students to the many ways that they can contribute to open source software development. An enormous thank you to all of the students, IT teachers, parents, mentors and organization administrators who made the Google Code-in 2012 a success!